The Moors Last Sigh

put our footprint on the world,’ beamed Abraham, proud of knowing the word’s new connotation. ‘What villagers these locals are with their talk of the rule of Ram! Not Ram Rajya but RAM Rajya – that is our ace in the hole.’
    Not Ram but RAM: I recognised at once the young fellow’s sloganising touch. Abraham was right. The future had arrived. There was a generation waiting to inherit the earth, caring nothing for old-timers’ concerns: dedicated to the pursuit of the new, speaking the future’s strange, binary, affectless speech – quite a change from our melodramatic garam-masala exclamations. No wonder Abraham, inexhaustible Abraham, turned to Adam. It was the birth of a new age in India, when money, as well as religion, was breaking all the shackles on its desires; a time for the lusty, the hungry, the greedy-for-life, not the spent and empty lost.
    I felt like a back number; born too fast, born wrong, damaged, and growing old too quickly, turning brutal along the route. Now my face was turned towards the past, towards the loss of love. When I looked forward, I saw Death waiting there. Death, whom Abraham continued effortlessly to cheat, might harvest the son in the immortal father’s place.
    ‘Don’t look so bleddy miserable,’ said Abraham Zogoiby. ‘What you need is a wife. A good woman to wipe the worry off your brow. Now then: Miss Nadia Wadia. What do you say to her?’

    Nadia Wadia!
    Throughout the year of her Miss World incumbency, Raman Fielding had pursued her. He wooed her with flowers, cordless telephones, video cameras and microwave ovens. She sent them back. He invited her to every civic reception, but after his performance on the day of Ganpati she invariably turned him down. Fielding’s desire for Nadia Wadia was leaked to the nation by Mid-day ’s celebrated gossip columnist ‘Waspyjee’, a descendant of an earlier writer who, under the same pen-name, had written about ‘Gama radiation’ in the Bombay Chronicle and, in so doing, terminated my great-grandfather Francisco da Gama’s brilliant career. After that Nadia Wadia’s refusal to be possessed by Mainduck became, for a certain kind of Bombayite, a symbol of a greater resistance – it became heroic, political. There were cartoons. In that city which Fielding claimed to ‘run like his private motor car’, Nadia Wadia’s hold-out was proof of the survival of another, freer Bombay. She gave great interviews, too. I wouldn’t kiss him if he was the last frog in town, vows Nadia … Duck, Mainduck! Nadia’s taking boxing lessons!  … the entertainment went on and on.
    Two things happened.
    One: Fielding, his patience snapping, considered putting the frighteners on the stubborn beauty queen; and so, for the first time in his long unquestioned leadership of the MA, faced a revolt, led by Sammy Hazaré and supported unanimously by all the ‘team captains’ of the MA’s ‘special operations’. The Tin-man led a group that visited Fielding in his frog-phoned office. ‘Sir not cricket sir,’ was their terse critique. Mainduck backed down, but after that he watched Sammy with the same look in his eye that I had seen when I told him about my family reconciliation. And he was right to do so, for Sammy had changed. And in a not-too-distant time would be pushed out of his lifelong supporting-player’s niche, forced by events and by the torments in his heart to play, in the great drama that was presently in rehearsal, an unforgettable leading rôle.
    Two: Nadia Wadia ceased to be the reigning Miss World. There was a new Miss India, a new Miss Bombay. Nadia Wadia became an old story. Her song was no longer played on the radio or on the new, Indian version of MTV: Masala Television ignored the fallen queen. Nadia Wadia never made it to medical college, the boyfriend of whom she had once spoken vanished into the blue, an acting career was stillborn. Money goes quickly in Bombay. Nadia Wadia at eighteen was a has-been, broke, rudderless, adrift. At this point Abraham Zogoiby made his move. He offered her, and her widowed mother, a luxury apartment at the southern end of Colaba Causeway, and a generous stipend to go with it. Nadia Wadia was no longer in a strong negotiating position, but she had not lost her pride. When she visited Abraham at Elephanta to discuss his offer – and how quickly that news reached Mainduck’s ears, via Lambajan Chandiwala, the double agent at our gates! How it enraged that wicked boss! –